Former Foreign Affairs Minister Bolaji Akinyemi Advises President Tinubu to Steer Clear of Confrontation with Trump

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bolaji Akinyemi, has asked President Bola Tinubu to avoid confrontation with the newly sworn-in 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump.

While speaking on Channels TV, Akinyemi said;

“If I were President Tinubu, I would try to steer clear of antagonising him because there is nothing a bully likes better than taking on people who are not strong enough to resist him. You know there is that African proverb that if you are not strong enough to take on a bully and you take him on, you are just even going to suffer more for it.

That’s the advice I will give President Tinubu: try and avoid having a confrontation with him even if that means that he does things that annoy or does things that step on the interests of Nigeria. There are ways in which you could address his reaction without confrontation,” he said.

 Akinyemi, a former Director General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), faulted Trump’s inaugural speech as uninspiring, “shocking, and depressing.”

The octogenarian said rather than rallying the world for peace, Trump took time to threaten the rest of the world with a bouquet of hostile policies including tacking back Panama Canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, tariff wars, and others.

Akinyemi said the US president would “soon learn that there are repercussions to policies, to jingoism”, adding that the world is “in for a rough ride for four years” of the Trump presidency.

The former Nigerian Minister of External Affairs said Nigeria is out of the focus on the 78-year-old most powerful president and that Africa’s most populous nation should not expect anything extraordinary from the Trump presidency.